Rachmaninoff’s Divine Liturgy: A masterpiece of Russian sacred music
Performed April 2, 2022 at 8:00 pm
Saint Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle
Featured Works
Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Op. 31 by Sergei Rachmaninoff
Concerto for Choir “The Grave and Death Could Not Hold the Mother of God by Sergei Rachmaninoff
Three Sacred Hymns by Alfred Schnittke
Sergei Rachmaninoff composed two major a cappella choral works—the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and the All-Night Vigil—that displayed his Orthodox faith in a manner that was innovative and fresh. In 1910 he turned to the sacred service of his church and with amazing speed composed the monumental Divine Liturgy. Afterward he said, “Not for a long time have I written anything with such pleasure.”
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, perhaps the last great representative of Romanticism in classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom that included a pronounced lyricism, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity, and a tonal palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colors. The piano features prominently in Rachmaninoff’s compositional output. He made it a point to use his own skills as a performer to explore fully the expressive possibilities of the instrument. Even in his earliest works, he revealed a sure grasp of idiomatic piano writing and a striking gift for melody.
Rachmaninoff wrote two major a cappella choral works—the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and the All-Night Vigil (also known as the Vespers). Other choral works include a choral symphony, The Bells, the Spring Cantata, the Three Russian Songs and an early Concerto for Choir (a cappella). He also completed three operas.
That Rachmaninoff’s sacred choral works have a growing number of admirers should be no mystery: if his piano works (and to some extent his symphonies) present the public face of a composer and performer who wanted to dazzle his listeners, these devotional works represent his other side, a deep spirituality crystallized as music.
The end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries saw an attempt on the part of church musicians in Russia to rid the sacred repertoire of foreign influences—in particular Italian, but also German—and to return to a style directly inspired by the various repertories of Russian chant. Instrumental in this movement was the Moscow Synodal School, and a number of composers connected with this institution, such as Chesnokov and Kastalsky, had led the way in the revival and classification of traditional Russian chant. While Rachmaninov’s All-night Vigil (Vespers) of 1915 is rightly regarded as the culmination of this revival, and as one of the great monuments of Russian sacred music, his Divine Liturgy of five years earlier should not be overlooked or merely dismissed as a ‘precedent’ for that work.
Kastalsky was one of the musicians to whom Rachmaninov looked for advice during the composition of the Divine Liturgy in 1910. Though he in fact quotes no actual chant, the melodic and harmonic style of the whole work is strongly influenced by the aesthetic ideals of Kastalsky, who himself wrote works in ‘chant style’ without actually using a chant melody. Just as important, however, is the influence of Tchaikovsky, whose legal victory over the publication of his own church music had made possible the great awakening of interest in the composition of sacred music in Russia. Though Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy and Vespers have always been somewhat disregarded by the Orthodox Church, their musical importance is just as great as their historical value, as Rachmaninov recognized.
It was in 1909 that Rachmaninov undertook his first tour of America. He hated the tour so much that he refused to agree to do any more, and spent the following summers at Ivanovka (his uncle’s country estate some 300 miles southeast of Moscow, which had recently passed into the composer’s possession) working on the Thirteen Preludes, Op 32 (1910), the Divine Liturgy, Op 31 (also 1910), the Études-tableaux, Op 33 (1911), the Fourteen Songs, Op 34 (1910, 1912), and the Second Piano Sonata, Op 36 (1913). The Divine Liturgy was given its first performance by the Synodal Choir, under the direction of Nikolai Mikhailovich Danilin on 25 November, 1910. Writing to his friend Nikita Morozov, Rachmaninov said: ‘I have been thinking about the Liturgy for a long time and for a long time I was striving to complete it. I started work on it somehow by chance, and then suddenly became fascinated with it. And then I finished it very quickly. Not for a long time … have I written anything with such pleasure.’ After hearing the work, Kastalsky made known to Rachmaninov certain objections he had to the setting (the ‘subjective’ Tchaikovskian element is after all more in evidence than the ‘objective’ chant-based style), and the ecclesiastical authorities did not sanction church performance of the work because of its ‘spirit of modernism’. Whatever Rachmaninov’s reaction to these criticisms, by the time the All-Night Vigil came to be composed in 1915, Kastalsky wrote glowingly of the way this ‘major artist’ made use of simple chant melodies.
Musically, the Divine Liturgy today seems steeped in the spirit of archaic chant inflections, however modern it may have seemed at the time of its composition. (Reminiscences of Tchaikovsky’s own Divine Liturgy in, for example, the athletic melodic and harmonic writing of the Second Antiphon are far from shocking to present-day listeners.) The richness of the scoring, the ‘choral orchestration’ that is such a characteristic of Russian sacred music of the time, is, if not quite as varied as in the Vigil, nevertheless deeply impressive. The feeling for liturgical appropriateness is also never absent, as anyone who has heard the Cherubic Hymn or the eight-part Lord’s Prayer sung during a service will know. Though many of the denser harmonic passages (Milost mira, the Lord’s Prayer, and Da ispolnyatsya usta nasha) and technical difficulties to be found in the broad construction of the First Antiphon and elsewhere put the work beyond the reach of the average Russian parish church choir, there is nothing intrinsically un-liturgical about the writing, and indeed there is little of greater difficulty than much of Bortnyansky’s music, for example. The work is in many senses an apotheosis of a particular style of writing. It is to be hoped that the Liturgy, which is seldom performed and has seldom been recorded, will become as well-known as its companion, the Vigil.
Rachmaninov was born forty years after the death of St Serafim of Sarov—one of the greatest of Russian mystics whose influence in his native country on all kinds of people during the last century was very considerable—and wrote his Liturgy a mere seven years before the Russian Revolution. As a man with a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the Church, Rachmaninov would, I think, have been and impressed and moved that his Divine Liturgy has survived to be sung and recorded outside his native country so long after his own death.
̶Ivan Moody
Less well-known is Rachmaninoff’s early choral work, Concerto for Choir, written in 1893. It was both a culmination of a great tradition and a starting point for so much of what followed in Russia. Such “concertos” were popular in the eighteenth century as additions to the Orthodox divine service. Although not subjected to the strict conditions governing liturgical music, they were none the less banned by Tsar Paul I in 1797 and soon fell out of fashion. Rachmaninoff’s three-movement “concerto” was very much unique in its day. It received only a single performance during the composer’s lifetime and was published without an opus number only after his death. The theme of the opening movement recalls that of the Finale of the Second Piano Concerto in C-minor, Op. 18, a work that still lay seven years in the future.
̶Albrecht Gaub
Alfred Schnittke was born in Engels, on the Volga River, in the Soviet Union. His father was born in Frankfurt to a Jewish family of Russian origin who had moved to the USSR in 1926, and his mother was a Volga-German born in Russia. Schnittke began his musical education in 1946 in Vienna where his father, a journalist and translator, had been posted. In 1948, the family moved to Moscow, where Schnittke studied piano and received a diploma in choral conducting. In 1962, Schnittke was appointed instructor in instrumentation at the Moscow Conservatory, a post that he held until 1972. Thereafter he supported himself for many years chiefly as a composer of film scores. Beginning in 1990, Schnittke resided in Hamburg, maintaining dual German-Russian citizenship.
The Three Sacred Hymns from the Orthodox liturgy were composed in 1983. The Russian conductor Valery Polyansky had requested an a cappella work for his choir, and though at first Schnittke seemed reluctant, he apparently woke in the middle of the night and wrote down these three pieces, and handed the manuscript to Polyansky the following day. The work was only published posthumously. Certain melodic figures and scale passages bind the three pieces together, as does the harmonic plan. The first piece uses the two choirs antiphonally and in strict canon, one measure apart, the first choir singing in E-flat major, the second choir a minor third lower in C minor; the second piece, a dramatic supplication rising from piano to fortissimo in a single brief arch, is in C minor; while the third piece, the most harmonically varied of the three, is in E-flat major. These settings possess clarity of utterance and simple directness; they are Schnittke at his most instinctive, most naturally devotional.
̶Paul Hillier